A Walk on Pancake Beach
Leverage at Low Tide
Forget it, pal. Keep looking for rocks. Flat ones. Keep your head down. A million rocks here to scavenge and sort. They won’t filter themselves. Rocks don’t have algorithms. Do they?
Oh, you looked up again. Why are you gawking at cyclists? You see thousands of people every day. Aren’t you tired of people watching? Look at the rocks.
Over time, maybe this Québec beach won’t have any more of these perfect, gray pancakes. Like the ones grandma Eleanor used to make. She called them silver dollars… and she griddled them faster than we could eat them. Somehow.
Man that guy is breathing loud – damn. Pay attention. Let that go and go back to the harvest. Je veux juste faire des ricochets avec mes roches sur la mer.
This beach really looks like a pile of pancakes. If everyone in the world loved skipping rocks as much as I do, would this beach be thrown away? Would we need rules? A license to skip?
Good thing we’re so busy watching each other, then. If we skipped stones like my grandma flipped flapjacks… I don’t even want to think about it. Je vais me perdre dans la plage.
Those folks in the driftwood house – what are they talking about? Shit. Never mind that. Step, scour, bend, pick, approach, rotate, release. Plap. Plap. Plap, plap Plap, plap, plap. Seven. Not bad.
I try to walk for an hour a day. This is often a work walk when I’m stuck on a tough problem or need some fresh ideas. Somewhere along the way, however, I forgot how to mind my own business. It’s fine to enjoy the sights and smells, but nothing ruins a good walk like being nosy.
This applies to almost all kinds of ambulation, from umarelling to hot boy walks. A work walk is intentional. You must hold a problem in your mind for long enough to make progress. And hold it lightly enough to be creative. That means keeping your rubbernecking to a minimum while still keeping an eye out for bears, snakes, roots, and electric scooters.
Umarells, the old farts who lurk around construction sites and count gravel trucks, are professionally minding their own business. They like to watch the industry.
Even a hot boy walk requires an independent mind. The requisite swagger of such a walk is impossible without an interesting line of thought or exploration.
A work walk is not a case of “deep work”. The goal isn’t to insulate yourself with three layers of ear plugs and a Zyn. It’s to limber up, walk, and think. This aligns with an important chess dictum: a good move accomplishes multiple objectives. A good work walk is extremely high leverage.
Unfortunately for us (but fortunately for those pancake beaches) we are not good at selectively minding our own business. Other people are profoundly interesting. When you hike a mountain for a spectacular view and run into a stranger at the top, any conversation with them will eclipse the panorama. It’s no wonder we like our cities.
Deep work is a red herring. We live in public, we work in public. You could engineer the texture out of your environment in order to focus. Or you could relearn how to mind your own business, settle into the groove, master walking, and profit from ambience of our wonderful cultural observatories. Even better – do both. Just don’t lose the ability to mind your own business.
Here’s my little recipe for a good work walk:
Do some easy tasks first.
Take on the hard problem for a bit.
Get stuck.
Formulate a question that would, if answered, get you unstuck.
Commit to going outside for 30 minutes, minimum.
Walk around, preferably where you can pay little attention to safety.
Mind your own business.
The beauty of walks is that they accomplish many things. An unproductive work walk is still a walk. You still moved and got some fresh air.
It’s also a proof of why the multiple objective rule (MOR) is so important in chess and elsewhere. It’s tactic-level leverage and doesn’t require momentum. Any time you can get multiple birds stoned at once, you should.
Occupe-toi de tes oignons.
“occupy yourself with your onions”
P.S. Applications to this year’s Protocol School are now open.
PSS: I had the pleasure of hosting Robert Peake on the Protocol Town Hall this week. Went in with emotional baggage from my highschool creative writing class. Left confident that poetry has its own place in the boardroom, on the playing field, and in serious engineering projects.
The style here is compelling!
so good!